Brain Trust (18 page)

The next stage, procedures, formalizes how you use all these multifarious gadgets. Aeronautics took this great leap forward in 1935 when the US Army Air Corps invented the preflight checklist. Today, before starting the engine on a tiny Cessna 140 you’re required to check the tail wheel, flaps, fuel, seat belts, etc.

Next is automation—in aeronautics, this is the autopilot, or in the 1980 FAA training film
Airplane
, the copilot blow-up doll phonetically named Otto. In this stage, action takes place autonomously but with human supervision.

But in the final stage, computer integration, the human is pruned from the functioning system entirely. Machines are the overseers and humans are relegated to the job of technicians, troubleshooting any glitches that arise.

What creates industry evolution? Darwin would be happy to know it’s natural selection, in this case taking the form of market pressure. It’s bad for business when planes crash and it’s also bad for business when you have to pay humans to do work that machines could do better (for the most part …). So generation II is
necessarily more cost-efficient than generation I, and this drives all industries along the righteous sixfold path.

Some industries don’t experience or are immune to these pressures and therefore fail to evolve. “Education hasn’t made it far along the continuum,” says Bohn. “Not enough economic pressure. [Or] take health care. What’s happening today is that standard procedure is just fighting its way in.”

If you need a job, your trick is this: First define the industry stage that matches your strengths. Are you an intrepid flier? A tinkering tweaker of existing systems? Are you a rule-maker at heart, salivating over the prospect of a seat-of-the-pants industry ripe for systematizing? Do you automate? Or are you a technician glitch-fixer?

Now find an industry that’s in the stage that matches your specialty. For example, until the tech bubble popped in 2001, the Internet as a whole was the realm of intrepid fliers—now it’s consolidating the best ideas.

Picking an industry that fits your fancy may be your best shot at getting out of the van down by the river.

In his book in progress
,
From Art to Science in
Manufacturing
, Roger Bohn writes about the two hundred years in which the Italian gun manufacturer Beretta went from individual craftsmanship to automated production lines, during which period craftsmen expertise was written into production protocol.

A study, famous in circles in which this kind of thing is famous, showed pictures of pure static to falling skydivers (imagine the logistics). While plunging rapidly toward the unforgiving earth, skydivers were more likely than subjects sitting in the plane to see phantom pictures in the static.

Another study found that in periods of economic uncertainty, more books on astrology are published.

And another found that nursing-home patients who care for plants in their rooms have lower mortality rates than patients whose staff care for the plants.

What do these three findings have in common? Not yet! Keep reading.

Jennifer Whitson, professor of management at the University of Texas’s McCombs School of Business, showed subjects a series of symbols and asked them to predict the next shape. Whitson then made half the subjects feel correct—revealing the shape they predicted—and made half the subjects feel incorrect, showing them an unrelated symbol (actually, there was no pattern, but that’s beside the point). Then she showed subjects twenty-four images blurred by a snowstorm. The wrong-shape subjects found pictures in the snow, even when none existed.

Finally the punch line: it’s all about control. Do you have it, do you lack it, and what will you do to get it. “Lacking control is a very aversive state,” says Whitson. “People like it so little we’ll do almost anything to take control.” Like spotting patterns where none exist. Or reading astrology books.

Here’s an example closer to home. Whitson presented subjects with the following story: You work in an office, monitoring and troubleshooting e-mail communications. You’re up for
a promotion. Suddenly you see a sharp rise in e-mail traffic between your boss and the person in the cube next to you. Then you don’t get the promotion. Whitson asked, Are these two events connected? Subjects Whitson had primed to feel in control were likely to see a coincidence. Subjects whom Whitson had asked, prior to the story, to imagine a time in their lives in which they lacked control saw a conspiracy.

The person in the next-door cube is out to get you.

Or is he?

It’s a tough call. And it’s a call you shouldn’t be making if you’re out of control.

Whitson tells the following illustrative (and possibly apocryphal) story: Deep in winter, a group of Swedish soldiers goes on a military exercise. It starts snowing, and they get lost. Soon they start to panic—until one of the soldiers yells, “Wait, wait, I found a map!” which they follow back to base camp. When they get there, a superior looks at the map and says, “This is a map of a different mountain range!”

Every day, when trapped in your equivalent of a Swedish snowstorm (you’ll know it when you see it), finding control—be it real or illusion!—can help you reclaim rationality in decision making. It’s as if by retaking control of your mental space, you can be objective about the world at large. You can, as the saying goes, change the things you can change, and accept the things you can’t—and you can know the difference between the two.

When the niggling worm of conspiracy whispers in your ear, Whitson recommends a quick mental check-in with an area of your life in which you do have control. Maybe keep pictures of your family on your desk. Or an assortment of flies from your last fishing trip. Not only can the feeling of control help you avoid the trap of the half-baked conspiracy theory, but, like Swedes in a snowstorm, confidence can lead to success.

When my kids were babies, I would lie in bed
listening to the hum of a noise machine that I swear spoke to me. In my defense, it was on some sort of soundtrack loop so that “jungle” or “waterfall” or “summer night” settings did actually have audible patterns. I would start with a blank mind, eventually zero in on a layer of the innocuous pattern, it would suggest words, and the more I listened the more distinct the repeating words would become. I talked about this with my wife, a psychologist, which for reasons that should be obvious was a rather egregious mistake. I wonder: If I’d been able to take control of my sleep, my work, or my play at that point, would I have continued hearing words in the sound machine?

Whitson and collaborators explored the
speech styles of young, dressed-down experts versus established, suited experts and found that experts are both more liked and more influential when their formal/informal speech style matches their appearance. If you’re a young hotshot, speechifying just sounds pompous—even if you know your stuff. If you’re a venerable lion or lioness, some degree of informality is fine, but can quickly be seen as crossing the line into inappropriateness.

Your condo’s front door faces the pool. In the summer months the irritation of noisy people splashing is balanced by the fact that you can so easily stroll across the walkway to join them. But this winter the condo association board has proposed a major pool renovation: months of jackhammering followed by the smell of sealant seeping into your living room and piles of construction materials outside your door.

Needless to say, you’d rather the pool renovation didn’t go ahead as planned. Maybe if you can show that other owners are against it, you could stop it before it starts.

“Almost universally among real pollsters, there’s no reason to bias the results,” says Charles Franklin, poli-sci professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and codeveloper of
pollster.com
. This is because polls with fringe results receive fringe respect. But you’re not a real pollster, and your results aren’t likely to be set next to results from a half dozen other firms—you don’t have to hit a sweet spot to be taken seriously. And luckily for you, there are many ways to sneakily insert poll bias, allowing you to fake a groundswell against pool renovations while continuing to appear impartial.

Franklin points first and most obviously to language. In the world of politics, Democrats may word an issue differently than Republicans (think “tax relief”) and depending on the level of language bias, you see a similar bias in poll results. In your campaign against pool renovation, use the language of the faction that opposes it—listen to how your neighbors talk about the work and repurpose their language for your poll. Do detractors wonder about the wisdom of “ripping up the pool”?

The sequence of questions also matters. “Suppose a poll opens with a series of questions about the slow rate of change in unemployment, follows with the handling of the Gulf oil spill, then asks about Obama’s job approval,” says Franklin. The approval rate will rank lower than if the poll had opened with questions on issues that painted Obama in a more favorable light. At your condo, have there been memorable renovation fiascos? If so, highlight these fiascos in the way you ask about the pool.

Question sequence can also encourage poll respondents to frame issues in certain ways. If a political poll opens with questions about the economy, respondents are likely to evaluate later questions in terms of their economic impact, more so than if the poll had opened with questions about the environment. You can do the same: Ask how people feel about recent increases in condo dues before asking how they feel about pool renovations.

Still another way polls drift is the way they push for answers. “When you ask people factual information, women tend to score lower on knowledge than men, but it’s largely due to answering ‘don’t know,’ ” says Franklin. “But if you push people to guess, it turns out that women are just as accurate.” Men are simply more willing to guess up front. And so polls that push for answers tend to include in the mix a more accurate representation of the female vote. Is there a gender gap in pool opinion? If so, push or don’t push for answers in order to exploit it.

Also, how deeply does a poll ask you to think about a question before responding? One theory of how we answer survey questions holds that we each carry one, true opinion—but it may take considerable digging to find it. And while digging we must pass and discard many opinions that are good enough. If a poll encourages you to satisfice, your quick answer can be much more beholden to poll mechanics, pop opinion, and the twelve-hour news cycle. So after inserting bias in your pool poll, asking for quick answers will dial up the effectiveness of this bias.

In fact, all this adds up to extreme difficulty for real pollsters to design a poll that doesn’t do any of these things. For you, it means the pool renovation proposal days are numbered—as is any issue that provokes your shiny, new, deliciously nasty skills for showing that public opinion is on your side.

Early in the lead-up to the 2008 Iowa caucus
, the American Research Group was the only firm in the state polling likely Democratic voters. Their polls showed John Edwards leading with Barack Obama far behind. Then, as things started to heat up in November and December, new pollsters arrived asking new questions, which showed very new results—suddenly Obama was polling much closer!

Was Obama really the beneficiary of a new popular groundswell, or did the change in polling methods more accurately describe the support that Obama had had all along? No matter, the media storyline read obama gaining speed in iowa! And this hopeful story line paved the way for Obama’s sweep through later primaries and then the general election.